There is much that could be said about the consecration of our new bishop on Saturday, but one image in particular stuck out to me from that day.

The cover art on the (forty-six page!) bulletin for the service was taken from a mosaic in Aachen Cathedral, in Germany. The mosaic depicts “The Pelican in her Pietry,” a classic medieval image of Christ. Medieval scholars believed (for whatever reason) that pelicans “nurse” their young by piercing their breasts to feed them with their own blood, a symbol that seemed to evoke both Christ’s sacrificial self-offering on the Cross and his continual self-offering in the Eucharist.

It is an image of Christ, as the program for the consecration notes, that is “both eucharistic and maternal in nature.”

It was an image that I was thinking about as I read through the bulletin while waiting for the service to begin. I happened to be sitting next to a dear friend, a priest with two young children even smaller than mine, someone with whom I’ve shared much of the complicated and sometimes-difficult experiences of parenthood and parish ministry alike. For both of us, having a bishop who is the mother of three teenagers and young adults was meaningful.

I was moved by the way in which this image of the pelican is a beautiful and complicated one: a depiction of the ways in which we offer ourselves to feed the people we love, and are fed by God’s own self-offering in turn.

But I was especially struck by a momentary glimpse, when Bishop Julia, after being vested, happened to turn—and we could see this image on her back.

What an image to choose, as the new leader of our portion of the church. It’s something I’ll be sitting with for a while. What does it mean to feed the people of our diocese from your own blood? What does it mean to be fed? What does it mean to carry this on your back, at every visitation, ordination, confirmation—at every sacramental event at which you serve during your time as bishop? How is this a comforting reminder of the maternal nature of a bishop’s ministry? And isn’t it kind of a troubling one?

I hope you’ll join your prayers with mine for Bishop Julia as her ministry officially begins. Bishop Alan has handed over the crozier; his time of shepherding our diocese is over, and Bishop Julia’s has begun! May Alan’s retirement offer him time for refreshment and rest, and may the Holy Spirit guide Bishop Julia in the weeks and months ahead!

This Saturday morning, clergy and laypeople from around our diocese will gather to celebrate the consecration of the Rev. Julia Whitworth as the Seventeenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Bishops from around our church will lay their hands on her to “consecrate” her, setting her aside for the office of bishop in the church, a moment that will be led by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church, along with the Rt. Rev. Jennifer L. Baskerville-Burrows—Bishop of Indianapolis, where Bishop-elect Julia served prior to her election—and the Rt. Rev. Matthew F. Heyd, Bishop of New York.

This consecration will induct our Bishop-elect into a line of bishops that stretches back two thousand years. Each bishop in our church is consecrated by a group of (at least) three others, each of whom was consecrated by three others, each of whom… and so on. Depending on exactly how you trace the “family tree,” any given Episcopal bishop today is in the 160-something-th “generation” in a line that stretches back through the founding generation of the Episcopal Church in the early days of the American republic, through more than a millennium of the history of the Church of England and the Church in Wales, and ultimately back to the first Bishops of Rome, Jerusalem, and Lyons and to their mentors, the apostles themselves.

This “apostolic succession” is about more than the laying on of hands. What is “handed over” is not a magic blessing, but a message. Each generation of our bishops entrusts to the next the incredible good news that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Sometimes we Christians live up to these words. Sometimes we betray them. Sometimes our bishops inspire us; sometimes they discourage us. But they embody, for us, the transmission over time of the simple but shocking idea that there is a God of boundless compassion and grace.

I hope that you’ll join me in praying for our Bishop-elect this Saturday! May her ministry among us embody God’s love for us. 

I was reminded this week of the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, which asks: Is an object the same if you’ve rebuilt the entire thing, one piece at a time?

This thought experiment takes its name from the story of Theseus, the legendary ancient king of Athens. Theseus was most famous for his defeat of the Minotaur, the half-human, the-bull monster to whom the Athenians were compelled to send young nobles to be sacrificed every few years. Theseus escaped the Labyrinth, rescued the victims, and sailed back to safety in Athens. And every year afterwards, the people of Athens celebrated this great day, by taking the ship on a sailing pilgrimage to Athens to honor Apollo.

Of course, keeping the ship seaworthy for generations meant frequent repairs, and eventually philosophers began to ask questions. Replacing a single part clearly doesn’t make it a different boat. But after centuries of maintenance, if each individual board and plank, each mast and sail, had been replaced since Theseus’s day—Could we really say that it’s still “The Ship of Theseus” at all?

It’s a decent question to ask of the church, as well.

I don’t think that this is only because as I write these words, I’m watching workers from Lyn Hovey’s stained glass studio scale the scaffolding outside my office to replace the stained-glass window in the nave, now beautifully restored. I don’t think it’s only because the kitchen is being upgraded and the paths in the Garden have been paved. The list of constant maintenance goes on—I can name the bell, and the door, and the organ, and more. The church is not the building, and the building is not the church, and yet in some real sense it is the ship in which we sail. (That’s why we call the body of the church the “nave”— navis is just Latin for a ship!) The building is a place of beauty in which we gather to worship God and spend time with one another, and if the work of rebuilding it piece by piece never seems to end, it’s sometimes helpful to remember that the only alternative is a ship that’s full of leaks.

But the church itself is constantly rebuilt, as well. And now I mean the people. Every year, a few members move away. Some have been with us for decades; some for just a year or two. Every year, new members begin to attend. Some are new to the neighborhood; some have lived here their whole lives. New parishioners are born, and some young or old pass away. Sometimes out of the blue it strikes me how much the church has changed, even just in the last four years, but it’s not a “directional” change. In other words, I don’t mean that we’re growing or shrinking, becoming younger or older; I simply mean that the collection of people who make up our church is constantly in flux, even as the church itself remains.

That’s probably true of our whole lives, as well. Each one of us is constantly rebuilt. Friendships come, and friendships go. We move on to new jobs, or trade one volunteering role for another. We move from place to place, or home to home. We may even change our minds, on rare occasions! And yet we are the same, even though by a thousand small steps we’ve traveled great distances from the way our lives once were.

But here’s the thing: even as we change, we remain the same. Whatever circumstances shape us, whatever situations in which we find ourselves, whichever ropes and planks we may replace, we are who we are. And “who we are” is nothing but the beloved children of God. Whatever choices you make, whatever you have done or left undone, wherever your voyage through this life takes you, however much you seem to have changed over the years, you are who you were at the moment you were baptized, when God looked at you, as God looked at Jesus, and said: This is my child, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.

On Monday this week, our church calendar observed the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels; this Sunday, our epistle reading from Hebrews compares Jesus to the angels. Given the other two readings on Sunday, which grapple rather contentiously with the topics of marriage and divorce, I likely won’t say much about angels on Sunday, per se. But angels are an interesting topic in and of themselves: They’ve been central to some people’s piety for thousands of years, and totally foreign to others’. So I thought I’d write a few words here for the curious on the rough topic: What’s the deal with angels, anyway?

First, a word on the word: “Angel” is borrowed from the Greek word angelos, which means “messenger.” That’s the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word mal’ak, which also means “messenger.” Both of them are used for both ordinary human messengers and for seemingly more-than-human messengers from God. To choose a couple of example out of a hat, Genesis 32 is following the story of Jacob: “Jacob went on his way,” it writes, “and the angels of God met him. … And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir…” In verse 1, the “angels of God” are mal’akim. In verse 3, the “messengers” Jacob sends to his brother are… also mal’akim. When John the Baptist sends two of his followers to see what Jesus is up to, Luke calls them the angelon of John, just as Gabriel is the angelos of God. (Luke 7:24, 1:26)

In English, on the other hand, we use “angel” as a bit of a technical term: You’d never call the courier who delivers you food from GrubHub or Meals on Wheels an “angel.” (Although, depending on how hungry you were, perhaps you might!) We use “angel” for human beings only by way of metaphor: a human is being “an angel” when they’re acting like we imagine one of the messengers of God might appear.

But already in the Greek- and Hebrew-speaking cultures that produced the Bible, angels were also understood in this technical sense: there was a difference between a mere human messenger, even a human messenger from God, and an “angel” per se. Angels were understood to be a kind of celestial being, distinct from humans and perhaps closer to God. In early Judaism and in most of the Hebrew Bible, angels exist as a kind of amorphous species, appearing without much detail and no names. Traditions of named angels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and so on) emerge later, in the last books of the Hebrew Bible, in pieces of the New Testament, and in other books that have ended up in the “in-between” status of the Apocryphal books.

The trend to personalize and add details to angels continued over time, and it makes sense. For many people, angels came to feel closer to them than God. “Angels,” for some, are not only God’s messengers but the ones through whom God works in the world, and this can be a comforting thing.

For others, angels don’t mean much. Particularly for those who are scientifically-inclined, the prospect of a species of rational, spiritual beings who possess free will but cannot be systematically observed seems strange. Others, of course, might suggest that they observe their work all the time! (And surely “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”?)

In the end, perhaps the best answer is the same old boring answer: There’s a healthy balance to everything. The most beautiful part of the Christian message is that you don’t need angels to be intermediaries between you and God. God the Father loves you like the world’s best mother loves her children. God the Son became a human being, and knows how hard it is. God the Holy Spirit is working in the world to draw you closer to God. God is with you, wherever you go, and God is for you.

And yet we all encounter messengers from God, I suspect more often than we think—mal’akim and angeloi and messengers, human and perhaps more than human. I’m a skeptical person myself, by nature. I struggle with the idea of angels, per se. But perhaps the last and best word comes from Hebrews, yet again, when it exhorts us to practice hospitality and love; to treat every stranger we see as though they could be a messenger from God—”for thereby wsome have entertained angels unawares.” (Heb. 13:2)

This Saturday, St. John’s will be included in the Charlestown Preservation Society’s House Tour. A group of us will be welcoming neighbors starting at 1pm on Saturday. I’m out of town at a church meeting on Thursday, so haven’t written something for News & Notes, but I thought it would be fun to share with you the “Brief Architectural History” we’ll be handing out to visitors, along with a few photos.

The Church is the people, not the building—but the building’s quite nice, too, and it is an incredible gift to have received such a beautiful place in which to worship from the generations before us. (Many thanks to the generations of Building Committees in particular, and especially for those who prepared the history below!)

The congregation of St John’s was established in 1840, on the eve of Charlestown’s mid-1840s building and population boom. The cornerstone for the church was laid on 5 May 1841, on what was then called Bow Street (formerly Crooked Lane), the outermost part of Town Hill; the nave was consecrated in November of that same year. That the new church was ready within six months after breaking ground reveals the success of a staggeringly impressive construction schedule and how much easier it is to construct a building that does not require electricity, heat or water. The front façade of dark ashlar granite with crenellated tower and the tall, pointed arch windows are typical of the Early Gothic Revival style, a British import popular at that time in Eastern Massachusetts. The architect responsible for design was Richard Bond, who also designed Lewis Wharf in Boston and Gore Hall at Harvard College, a building which was torn down and replaced by the Widener Library, but whose image still graces the seal of the City of Cambridge.

The original design of the church’s interior was distinctly “low church”: warm browns, golds and terra cotta on the walls, galleries on all three sides, with organ in the rear, box pews, diamond-shaped clear glass in all the windows and only a small slightly raised sanctuary which contained two chairs, a lectern and a communion table. The two chairs are still in use today.

I’ve always loved the inscription on the baptismal font:
“From the Children of St. John’s, Easter 1845.”

In 1876-77, extensive alterations were made by architect A.C. Martin and included the arches one sees here today, which at that time were heavily decorated as was the border of the stained glass window and paneling behind the altar; there was also a decorative stencil along the top of the wainscot in the nave. The box pews remained, only to leave around 1910-11, when the wood floor of quarter-sawn oak was installed. The window over the altar is the only figured memorial window in a church in Charlestown, and is dedicated to the memory of Peter and Sara Hubbell. Peter was a long time Senior Warden of the church, a brick manufacturer who lived on Monument Square and built 1-2 Laurel Street. It was Peter Hubbell who in 1856 donated the 3,000 pound bell which still hangs in the tower and is rung by the congregation’s children every Sunday (with a little help from the adults). The window is the work of noted artisan W. J. McPherson. The stained glass on the sides of the church were produced by Kelley and Holland.

In addition to the bell and the window, the Hubbells can lay claim to another central part of our lives: Mrs. Hubbell donated the communion silver we use every week in memory of her husband, who was, as the inscription notes, Senior Warden of the parish for twenty-three years (!).

In 1998, the parish made a significant exterior restoration, including new copper roof flashing and selective slate replacement, repointing and cleaning of the granite and brick. This followed the installation of the “new” 1873 Odell tracker organ, which was bought from a church in Old Saybrook, Connecticut and fit into its space at St John’s perfectly. In 2003, with grants from Historic Boston and others, lighting for the church steeple was installed. More recently, the altar area and railings were reworked so that the original altar could be brought into the center of the platform; the step up to the altar was considerably widened and hand rails installed. In doing this work, two shoes were found in a wall cavity, a tradition of the time; however, what was unique about these shoes was that one was a man’s shoe and the other a woman’s. Pictures were taken, an article appeared in the bridge, and then the shoes were put back into the wall. The nave was also repainted at this time, in neutrals, but the narthex (entry) repainting was done in one of the historic colors and the stenciling on the wainscot was reproduced.

It is significant to note that for over a century the parish was served by only three priests. The Reverend Thomas R. Lambert served from 1856-1883; the Reverend Philo W. Sprague served from 1884-1923 (at which time he became rector emeritus), and then the Reverend Wolcott Cutler, who served from 1924-1959. The Reverend Mr. Cutler left a lasting legacy in his work to preserve Charlestown’s historic neighborhood and in his slide collection of Charlestown scenes and people, which is available for viewing through the Boston Public Library. Mr. Cutler is also primarily responsible for the Forest Garden behind the Church and Parish House, which is currently undergoing accessibility improvements funded by a Community Preservation Act grant

Today, St. John’s remains a vibrant parish church, open for worship every Sunday at 10am. The Parish House hosts community groups including the Charlestown Coalition’s Turn It Around, Jr. youth group, the Charlestown Community Cares Clothes Closet, addiction recovery meetings, and more.